ISS and Shuttle in May. Original image: Paolo Nespoli / Expedition 27

It’s been a looooong time since I’ve done a wallpaper post. Mostly because I can usually link to a wallpaper version of a decent picture. So when I saw this image of the ISS and docked shuttle, well I just had to post it even though you can get wallpaper versions and variations of this.

The image was taken by Expedition 27 crew member Paolo Nespoli from the Soyuz TMA-20 after it undocked on May 23, 2011. The picture is also among the first taken from the perspective of a Russian Soyuz.

To be more screen friendly to me the background images are rotated, flipped (because my screen icons cover the ISS/Shuttle) and of course re-sized from the original which can be found by looking through NASA’s image gallery.

Saturn's moon Helene from the Cassini spacecraft. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Nice dramatic image eh? Quick post today, things are happening and I’m not sure they are good, but I’m not sure. Gotta go.

NASA’S description (click for the original):

Saturn’s small, irregularly shaped moon Helene is strikingly illuminated in this close view captured by Cassini during the spacecraft’s June 18, 2011, flyby.
Although it is not visible at this exposure, the planet actually fills the dark background of this image of Helene. See High-Res Helene for another close-up from this encounter.
This view looks toward the anti-Saturn side of Helene (33 kilometers, or 21 miles across). North on Helene is up. Lit terrain on the right is on the leading hemisphere while lit terrain at the top of the image surrounds the north pole.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 11,000 kilometers (7,000 miles) from Helene and at a Sun-Helene-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 151 degrees. Image scale is 67 meters (220 feet) per pixel.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

Cave opening in a Martian crater. Click for a slightly larger version. Source: NASA/UA MRO HiRISE Operations Center (HiROC)

What a really nice image! You can see right on down inside, want a much larger version?  Click here.

More at the MRO HiRISE Operations Center

Image caption by Shane Byrne:

Earlier this year, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter CTX camera team saw a crater containing a dark spot on the dusty slopes of the Pavonis Mons volcano. We took a closer look at this feature with HiRISE and found this unusual geologic feature.

The dark spot turned out to be a “skylight,” an opening to an underground cavern, that is 35 meters (115 feet) across. Caves often form in volcanic regions like this when lava flows solidify on top, but keep flowing underneath their solid crust. These, now underground, rivers of lava can then drain away leaving the tube they flowed through empty. We can use the shadow cast on the floor of the pit to calculate that it is about 20 meters (65 feet) deep.

The origin of the larger hole that this pit is within is still obscure. You can see areas where material on the walls has slid into the pit. How much of the missing material has disappeared via the pit into the underground cavern?

Later this year, HiRISE will acquire a second image to create a stereo pair. Seeing this feature in stereo will help us unravel the mystery of its formation.

Mankind has a rich history of looking up at the stars and telling stories about them.  One of the best “story lines” is the existence of other worlds, and speculation about the possible inhabitants of those worlds.

It’s hard to believe that the existence of exoplanets has only been confirmed since 1992, with the detection of several terrestrial-mass planets orbiting a pulsar (PSR B1257+12).  The first planet found orbiting a main-sequence star was 51 Pegasi b (in 1995).  You remember 51 Pegasi b, don’t you?  Bellerophon?

Image from NASA - super-Earth size comparison with "default" Earth

Some of you are out there right now bouncing off the walls.  No, I haven’t forgotten Campbell, Walker, and Yang and their 1988 discovery.  It was there in 1988, it just wasn’t confirmed until 2002.

Given that our current detection methods are so primitive, and that we’ve really only been looking for a short time, we might find that planets are very common throughout the Cosmos.  We’ve already found that planets come in more variety than imagined, and we have fun speculating on what type of life might be found on them.

NASA - artist's impression of Chthonian planet

The way we now discuss finding exoplanets now, you’d think all we had to do was pick a star, any star, and start counting.  That’s not at all how it works.  Planets are extremely difficult little critters to locate.  They’re very poor light sources, for one thing, emitting only one millionth the light of their parent stars.  They also tend to get “washed away” in the glare of the parent star.

So, exoplanets are extremely difficult to locate.  Even more difficult would be locating the “signature” of biological life.  In astronomy (as in all things) it’s helpful to know what you’re looking for before you start looking.  As we’re not sure what kinds of life might be “out there”, we’re uncertain yet as to what we should be looking for.

NASA/GSFC/Marc Kuchner - size comparison of different exoplanet types

In the short amount of time we’ve been looking since 51 Pegasi b, an amazing array of planet types has been discovered.  Bellerophon itself is a “Hot Jupiter”, just one type in a crowd; and that’s a pretty interesting crowd.  Check it out:  Super-Earth, Hot Neptune, Hot Jupiter (said that), helium planet, coreless planet, Chthonian planet, carbon planet, iron planet, ocean planet, terrestrial planet, Goldilocks planet, gas giant, eccentric Jupiter, and pulsar planet.

Amazing.  The diversity alone is staggering.  Who know what life forms have evolved to fill these niches.

Craters on Vesta. Link for the full sized images below. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

I find this image intriguing. In particular the black (or at least dark) ejecta or is that the remnants of the impacting body seems out of character when compared to other nearby ejecta.

Check out the full sized image for a bit more detail (link goes to NASA for the image) or click the image for an enlargement of the region.

More images at the Dawn website.

The caption below is very brief and gives no clues or indication of what it might be.

August 15, 2011 – PASADENA, Calif. — NASA’s Dawn spacecraft obtained this image with its framing camera on August 6, 2011. This image was taken through the framing camera’s clear filter aboard the spacecraft. The framing camera has a resolution of about 273 yards (250 meters) per pixel. UPDATE: The resolution for these images are more closely computed to about 280 yards (260 meters).

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s short and sweet.

Hey, my email seems to be working again YAY!

Source

Mike the Mad Biologist asks:

If we look at each wordsum category separately, which ones are significantly different? I ask because the trend seems to reflect the liberal-conservative split (low and high lean left; middle leans conservative). It also seems to mirror educational attainment–moderately educated people (some/completed college) are more likely to be conservative.

Hard to suss out causal factors here.

Well, here’s a logistic regression from the GSS:

Don’t take it too seriously. A lot of these are categorical variables which happen to be rank ordered (e.g., most liberal = 1 and most conservative = 7). But as you can see the WORDSUM correlation disappears when you throw in other variables. In fact, even education isn’t statistically significant anymore. That seems ludicrous, but remember that Biblical literalism is strongly correlated with lower levels of education and intelligence. Once you throw that in there as an explanatory variable it sucks up all the oxygen.

Congenital human baculum deficiency: the generative bone of Genesis 2:21-23.

“Another genetic condition, extending to 100% of human males, is the congenital lack of a baculum. Whereas most mammals (including common species such as dogs and mice) and most other primates (excepting spider monkeys) have a penile bone, human males lack this bone and must rely on fluid hydraulics to maintain erections. This is not an insignificant bone. The baculum of a large dog can be 10 cm long x 1.3 cm wide x 1 cm thick… Human bacula have been reported, usually in association with other congenital diseases or penile abnormalities.

One of the creation stories in Genesis may be an explanatory myth wherein the Bible attempts to find a cause for why human males lack this particular bone. Our opinion is that Adam did not lose a rib in the creation of Eve. Any ancient Israelite (or for that matter, any American child) would be expected to know that there is an equal (and even) number of ribs in both men and women. Moreover, ribs lack any intrinsic generative capacity. We think it is far more probable that it was ...

In the midst of a lot of bad science news (though to be fair there’s some good news, too) comes some great news: in the UK, students taking A-level math and science has gone way up. There’s been a 40% jump in math, and 20% each in physics and chemistry over the past 5 years.

Why? No doubt it’s at least partly because employers need people highly-trained in sciences — our new technology won’t invent itself, folks (the T-1000 notwithstanding).

But the UK newspaper The Guardian (and the BBC as well), reporting on this, wonders if perhaps there is one man behind this: Brian Cox.

Brian is a scientist, a speaker, a science popularizer, and has hosted several TV shows, including the wildly popular "Wonders of the Solar System" and "Wonders of the Universe". Brian used to be in a rock band, and has the sort of Beatles-esque look, charm, and talent that makes his work very compelling.

Full disclosure: Brian and his wife, Gia, are friends of mine. I’ve done a few things with Brian in the past (a podcast taped at the ...

One of IBM’s prototype cognitive computing chips

What’s the News: Researchers at IBM have developed a new “cognitive computing” microchip inspired by the brain’s computational tricks. These new chips, the researchers say, could make processors that are more powerful and more efficient than today’s computers—and better at the flexible learning and responses that are a struggle for current AI systems but a breeze for the human brain.

How the Heck:

IBM has made two prototypes of the new chip, which it calls a “neurosynaptic core.” Both are built on a standard semiconductor platform with 256 “neurons,” the chip’s computational components. RAM units on the chip act as synapses; one of the chips has 262,144 synapses, while the other has 65,536.
These networks take after the brain in two key ways, says Dharmendra Modha, the project leader at IBM. The hardware for memory and computation are quite close together (as they are in the brain, where neurons are responsible for both) and the connections between them form, strengthen, and weaken based on learning and experience, just like synapses between neurons.
Other than that, the researchers haven’t yet shared many specifics on how the ...

New York Magazine has a rundown of the attitudes of some of the G.O.P. candidates for the nomination in regards to evolution. Remember, this is an issue which is split down the middle in the American populace, but elites have a strong skew toward accepting evolution. This is probably why despite a majority Creationist primary electorate in 2008 the majority of Republican candidates still agreed with the evolutionary position. In 2012 it looks like the Creationism or semi-Creationist contingent is going to get larger.

In the General Social Survey they asked in the late 2000s whether respondents accepted that “humans developed from animals.” The response was dichotomous. Here are some results for various population groups:

Accepts human development from animals Democrat
59 Independent
53 Republican
42 Liberal
69 Moderate
52 Conservative
39 White
54 Black
35 Hispanic
52 No high school diploma
42 High school diploma
46 Junior college
53 Bachelor
63 Graduate
72 New England
81 Mid Atlantic
60 Great Lakes
52 Upper Midwest
54 South Atlantic
46 East South Central
29 Southwest
38 Mountain
53 Pacific
64 Protestant
35 Catholic
65 Jewish
79 No religion
79 Age 18-34
58 Age 36-64
51 Age 65-*
43

At Culture of Science there’s a little discussion about whether acceptance of evolution indicates intelligence. Looking at the GSS data there doesn’t seem to be a strong causal relationship when you control for other variables. But there is a correlation. That correlation can be explained by the fact that, for example, people who are Biblical literalists tend to be duller than those who are not, and Biblical literalists don’t accept evolution (in fact, I’ve seen evidence that very intelligence Biblical literalists are more Creationist than their duller co-religionists, probably because they’re more coherent in their beliefs).

With that, I’ll leave you with a screenshot of the results for WORDSUM, a 10 word vocabulary test, against acceptance or rejection of human evolution from other organisms (note that the numbers below the proportions are weighted sample sizes):

The real divergence is at the super high end of intelligence.

As I sit, I squint at my computer LCD monitor, so I put on my prescription glasses to see better. I should’ve put them on earlier, because now I have a headache, so I take a couple of ibuprofens with a glass of fresh clean water from my tap.

I stretch my back a bit because it’s sore. I have a herniated disk — I found out last week when I got an MRI — and I’ll be going to the doctor in a few days to see if I need surgery, or perhaps just a cortisone injection to reduce the swelling. A friend said stuff like that hurts more when it rains, but I looked online and found out that’s a myth. I checked the weather anyway and the satellite view shows it’s pretty clear.

But man, that reminds me. I need a new computer — the latest models are so fast, and use so much less energy — and it sure would make browsing easier. That weather page took forever to download! At least five or six seconds.

The news page is even worse. And when it finally downloads, what do I see? Some scientist complaining that their budget is going ...

Is this dog really smiling?

We beam when we’re cheerful, grin sheepishly when we’re guilty, smirk when we’re proud. It all seems so simple and obvious, but what do we really know about smiling?

In a new book called Lip Service: Smiles in Life, Death, Trust, Lies, Work, Memory, Sex, and Politics, Yale University experimental psychologist Marianne LaFrance investigates the subtleties of smiling, showing how the familiar expression reveals more than we realize. Wired has an amusing Q&A with the doctor herself:

Wired.com: Why can smiles mean such different things in different cultures?

LaFrance: We acquire ways of knowing who is us and who is them. There have been fascinating studies where Australians and Americans were shown a bunch of face shots of other Australians and Americans. Their task was to identify which nationality, Australian or American, the person was. Shown neutral expressions, accuracy was no better than chance. But shown smiles, they were very good at guessing a person’s nationality. Subtle difference in a person’s smile are detectable, even if we can’t describe why.

Now there are also vast cross-cultural differences in the rules for smiling. Who is it OK to smile at, who not? ...

Best friends!!

Modern life is about maximizing information overload. So while you watch your favorite shows on the boob-tube, chances are you’re also surfing the Interwebs, looking for that actor’s screen credits, buying the season on DVD, checking other people’s real-time reactions. Ah, but what if your TV pulled up all that stuff for you, and helpfully displayed it on your computing device of choice, a la Google Ads in your email? Wouldn’t that be…something?

Before the end of the year, just such a TV will be released by a start-up called Flingo—a TV that, should you opt in to the service, will note what you’re watching and customize what your computer shows you. Technology Review got details from some officers of the company:

“Any mobile app or Web page being used in front of your TV can ask our servers what is on right now,” says David Harrison, cofounder and CTO of Flingo. “For example, you could go to Google or IMDB and the page would already know what’s on the screen. Retailers like Amazon or Walmart might want to show you things to buy related to a show, like DVDs, or ...

1) Post from the past: The arc of evolutionary genetics is long.

2) Weird search query of the week: “sandra laing genetics.” This was actually the #1 query the past week. That’s the strange part, as Sandra Laing isn’t in the news right now from what I can tell.

3) Comment of the week, in response to None dare call it eugenics, two comments:

6. Christopher@BorderWars Says:

Throwing around the term “Eugenics” is akin to the internet tactic of invoking the Nazis. Without talking specifics, it’s just an attempt to smear by associating the mundane aspects with the horrific. For instance, nearly anything that’s authoritarian has been called “fascist” … why not just use authoritarian? Do we need to hang death camps and the final solution on anything that is remotely governmental?

People make little e eugenic decisions when they mate select. They also espouse eugenics in a passive manner when they follow fashions, idolize models and athletes, etc. Heck, they defraud the eugenic assumptions when they get cosmetic surgery, apply copious amounts of makeup, get hair plugs, and even work out excessively using supplements and drugs. If you desire to ...

“Is Evolution Predictable?” asks a piece in Science. Here’s the first paragraph:

If one could rewind the history of life, would the same species appear with the same sets of traits? Many biologists have argued that evolution depends on too many chance events to be repeatable. But a new study investigating evolution in three groups of microscopic worms, including the strain that survived the 2003 Columbia space shuttle crash, indicates otherwise. When raised in a lab under crowded conditions, all three underwent the same shift in their development by losing basically the same gene. The work suggests that, to some degree, evolution is predictable.

The “some degree” part is the catch. I’m a big fan of general ideas, but the more I learn about evolution the more suspicious I become of broad truths. A given dynamic often has some degree of validity, but extending it too far leads to error or confusion in innumerable specific cases. Evolution may be the most robust and powerful theory for deductive inference in biology, but even here rationalism has its limits. For example, before the rise of molecular methods in exploring polymorphism the debates ...

It’s a handbag. It’s a wallet. No, it’s biofuel.

A genuine alligator-leather purse could put you out of hundreds of dollars, but alligator fuel may come fairly cheap. Large fuel plants could produce biofuel from alligator fat for as little as $2.40 a gallon, suggests a recent paper published in the journal Industrial Engineering Chemistry Research. Last we checked, the old-fashioned stuff from long-dead critters was retailing for a buck or so more.

Why use gator fat for fuel? Well, as chemical engineer Rakesh Bajpai and his colleagues at the University of Louisiana pointed out, some 15 million pounds of alligator fat is wasted each year. Alligator farms harvest the animals’ hides and meat to make fashionable accoutrements and deep-fried appetizers, but the ancient creatures’ fat just gets dumped into landfills.

Knowing that alligator fat has a high lipid content, which is useful for biofuel, the researchers decided to test how feasible making alligator juice really is. After treating the fat with chemical solvents and shoving it into a microwave, the team was able to convert about 61 percent of the fat into lipids for biofuel. They then refined some fuel from the lipids and found ...

By Jon Winsor

For the past few days, the Perry campaign has been laying down some serious anti-science markers. Between saying “a substantial number of [climate] scientists… have manipulated data” (an accusation they couldn’t come close to substantiating) and saying, “In Texas, we teach both creationism and evolution,” Perry has been going all out for the anti-science primary vote.

A lone, unambiguous, pro-science voice in the Republican field, Jon Huntsman tweeted today:

To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.

You’re not crazy, former governor Huntsman, you’re just working in a field where rational activity has had, shall we say, a strange definition in recent years.

Earlier in the week, Huntsman’s strategist John Weaver reacted to both Perry and Romney’s recent statements:

“We’re not going to win a national election if we become the anti-science party,” John Weaver, Huntsman’s chief strategist, said in an interview Wednesday. “The American people are looking for someone who lives in reality and is a truth teller because that’s the only way that the significant problems this country faces can be solved. It appears that the only science that Mitt Romney believes in is the science of polling, and that science clearly was not a mandatory course for Governor Perry.”

Weaver was also John McCain’s chief strategist in 2000 and 2008. In June, Weaver told Esquire magazine “There’s a simple reason our party is nowhere near being a national governing party… No one wants to be around a bunch of cranks.” Like with Weaver’s previous campaigns, this one seems to involve a large dose of straight talk.

Sometimes I hear astronomy news that is cool, and sometimes I hear news that’s very cool… and sometimes I hear news where my reaction is, "That’s freaking insane!"

The latest news: scientists have used data tracking sound waves inside the Sun to see sunspots forming 60,000 kilometers (36,000 miles) deep in the Sun’s interior, fully two days before the spots erupt onto the surface!

That’s freaking insane.

OK, first, the video, then, the explanation.

[Make sure to set the resolution to 720p or 1080p to get the full effect.]

I love the last few seconds of that video; the rotation of the Sun sweeping the towering loops of magnetically-influenced plasma around to the limb is simply stunning.

So how does this all work? Sound waves.

Basically, inside the Sun, hot plasma (gas stripped of one or more electrons) rises and cooler plasma sinks. As it moves, it generates turbulence. This in turn creates acoustic waves — sounds — that travel through the Sun. As these waves move through the solar interior, regions with different densities make them speed up or slow down. The physics of this is pretty well understood, so by mapping how long it takes a ...